For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
I believe there is no person in the world that must be protected from pictures. Everything that happens in the world must be shown and people around the world must have an idea of what’s happening to the other people around the world. I believe this is the function of the vector that documentary photography must have, to show one person’s existence to another.
Source: fotojournalismus
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Thoughts are like clouds, they should float above us freely as gaseous molecules, unconfined. You don’t hold onto ideas and get attached as if they were your own children, you take them for their intellectual worth, treat them as art pieces in a gallery, critique them and change them around as logic sees fit. You can’t own a cloud, defend a cloud against another cloud based off of personal bias. You just let it float to where it needs to go, and if it needs to leave, then leave it.
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
George Bernard Shaw
Share ideas? Instead of flattery and hate. (Although all previous flattery is still appreciated and highly questioned.)
I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.
My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
The balance of nature is built of a series of interrelationships between living things, and between living things and their environment. You can’t just step in with some brute force and change one thing without changing many others. Now this doesn’t mean of course that we must never interfere, that we must not attempt to tilt that balance of nature in our favor but when we do make this attempt we must know what we are doing. We must know the consequences.
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that’s the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927)
Some may look at this quote and groan- not only do we not know, we are not even capable of imagining what we don’t know. At some point, I could have easily fallen in that group. Why bother with understanding the bends and curves of the universe, if I can barely get myself to imagine them? But now it’s absolutely delightful to imagine that I can’t imagine, that outside my narrow understanding there is something rich, something topsy turvy, something unthinkable going on. It’s inebriating. When people lay down to look at the light of dead stars, they think, ironically egotistically, I am so small, I am irrelevant, instead of marveling at the bedtime story unfolding in front of their sleeping eyes.
What I don’t know, is not only far more interesting than what I think I know, it is breathtaking.
It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Here are some 